Swift Development - List of Resources You Must Bookmark

Ever since the introduction of iOS, there is iOS development fever across the globe. Many iOS developers & companies are making fortunate out of it. By using Objective-C and Apple homebrew XCode SDK, there are more than 1 million apps in Appstore now! Apple didn't stop there, they are going to push it to another level by introducing a new high level programming language - Swift. Objective-C without the baggage of C is how Craig Federighi described it during the conference.

Swift is designed to be fast, modern, safe and interactive. Even though it is a high level programming language, its speed is much more faster than Objective-C. You can mix it with Objective-C and C altogether in a project too (Not a good idea though!).

Honestly, I was pretty excited about Swift. I wanted to dive into iOS development, but as a web developer for half of my life, it isn't easy for me to get into programming with low-level language. So, this announcement is actually quite an exciting news to me. I started to find resources about it and even started to learn how to use XCode. I decided to start from basic of Objective-C so I'll know the differences. It was a painful process. Objective-C has been serving Apple well for 20+ years, and I must say, it is not a friendly language at all.

As a PHP developer, I found Objective-C is a beast, very steep learning curve and a lot of weird and repetitive coding. To cut it short, it's indeed a low-level language, too low to my liking. My motive to learn the basic of Objective-C is to know the native solution first before moving on to high level. Just like how we start by learning Javascript first before moving on to jQuery.

Swift does a lot behind the scene to eliminate all those inconveniences and tedious practives of Objective-C. As a result of that, Objective-C codes are being simplified into shorter code and easier to understand. Take the following code illustrated during the conference as example:

Objective-C

Swift

myDelegate?.scrollViewDidScroll?(myScrollView)

Variable assignment is almost the same with Javascript except they eliminate the needs of semicolon. Comparing to Objective-C, it's just painful to write. Here is the declaration of String type variable.

Objective-C

NSString *myString = @"This is my string.";

Swift

var myString = "This is my string."

Are you getting excited yet? During the my own research and learning, I found a good collection of useful resources about Swift. If you started to learn it just like I do, this list will be very handy. But first of all, you need the SDK. Swift is only available in XCode 6 Beta which only available for those with Apple Developer account, but if you search around *ahem*, you will able to download it elsewhere.

Here you go, below is a list of resources, you will get written tutorials, video tutorials, references, sample codes and swift community. Drop me a commnet if you discovered something useful. Enjoy!

Tutorial Series #1

Tutorial Series #2

A comprehensive Swift tutorial created by James Quave. This 6 parts tutorials focus on created iOS app. You will learn from basic to advanced techniques such as web API request, Parsing JSON, Table View, Async image loading & caching, interaction with multiple views and best practices.

Tutorial Series #3

This tutorial will walk you through the creation of a geolocation based alarm app for travelers. The concept is simple: users create a new alarm by selecting both a geographic region and music item from their library. When the phone detects itself crossing the region boundary of an alarm (enter or exit) the relevant music plays.

Kevin Liew is a web designer and developer and keen on contributing to the web development industry. He loves frontend development and absolutely amazed by jQuery. Feel free to say hi to me, or follow @quenesswebblog on twitter.